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Machines Are Going To Perform More Tasks Than Humans By 2025 (cnbc.com)
In less than a decade, most workplace tasks will be done by machines rather than humans, according to the World Economic Forum's latest AI job forecast. From a report: Machines will overtake humans in terms of performing more tasks at the workplace by 2025 -- but there could still be 58 million net new jobs created in the next five years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) said in a report on Monday. Developments in automation technologies and artificial intelligence could see 75 million jobs displaced, according to the WEF report "The Future of Jobs 2018." However, another 133 million new roles may emerge as companies shake up their division of labor between humans and machines, translating to 58 million net new jobs being created by 2022, it said. At the same time, there would be "significant shifts" in the quality, location and format of new roles, according to the WEF report, which suggested that full-time, permanent employment may potentially fall. Some companies could choose to use temporary workers, freelancers and specialist contractors, while others may automate many of the tasks. New skill sets for employees will be needed as labor between machines and humans continue to evolve, the report pointed out.
Name one job that doesn't use a machine? Sure, most require a human to operate machines. A computer is a machine, a can opener is a machine, a typewriter is a machine... almost every job already requires a machine.
Now, automated machines is a different thing- they might not have replaced humans yet but even coopers and blacksmiths in ye olde medieval Europe used machines, Machines have been around since man put a stone in a sling.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
whatever will we do when the internal combustion eliminates the plowman and the horseshoe. Our agrarian based society will collapse. waaaah!
get real, you have no idea what jobs will exist in 10 years.
automation and IT creates jobs
The tools that came out of the DevOps revolution are now going enterprise-wide. It's only a matter of time before most SA jobs become dead-end and then are eliminated. Organizations no longer need a bunch of Unix or Windows admins who are basically power users who can follow instructions. We've circled back a generation to where to be a SA who gets paid well and has job security you'll need to be able to script that system like a boss.
...this has already happened.
I mean are they counting robotic car assembly as "workplace tasks"? What about assembly line QA by image recognition? Is that a "workplace task"?
To vaguely defined to be much more than bullshit click bait.
Which economic system is that? I can't think of any economic system based on that premise in all of history. People who want jobs but don't have them have been around for as long as there has been a concept of a "job."
The situation full automation brings into light is that the concept of ownership and the rights to profits of use of capital is breaking down. If human labor is not required to make productive use of capital, then labor cannot be the source of wage. The social upheaval will be because currently only money can be used to gain ownership of capital, and if you have no capital and nobody will give you money for labor, there is no longer a mechanism to gain capital.
This means either forcing a (larger) portion of the productive use of capital distributed to more non-owners (let alone employees!), or reducing the concept of private ownership of capital. Either of those would be a tenuous transition, if for no other reason that people are not used to anything else.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
And to some extent the agrarian system did collapse, and beginning with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, you started to see many agrarian workers heading to the cities to work in the factories and related forms of employment. But we're rapidly running out of places where displaced workers can go to find new work. When even service industry jobs like cashiers at department and grocery stores are becoming extraneous, where is it you imagine those people are going to go? For the skilled workers in many fields employment is guaranteed, at least for now, but as we've seen with low-skilled blue collar workers in industrial settings, automation means they end up going from relatively high-paying jobs to more service-oriented jobs, and now that even McDonalds is becoming increasingly automated, even that far less than ideal replacement work is fading away.
At some point, as automation begins to out perform even the cheap labor of developing countries, it isn't just Western low-skilled and service industry workers who are going to find themselves unemployed and unemployable by robots and AI.
The farm hands of the 18th and 19th centuries had options, even if those options were far from ideal. Where precisely do you suggest a single mom with two kids or some 55 year old divorcee getting back on their feet go when all the tills at Walmart are replaced by scanners and two or three floor managers to keep things rolling along smoothly?
This isn't the Industrial Revolution. We've been watching the process of increasing automation for nearly fifty years, and from where I sit, I can see major industrial centers like Detroit basically depopulating. For the moment the system is buoyed by a need for service industry workers, but in part that low unemployment will simply drive automation even faster as businesses give up on finding employees and invest in automation. And then, at some point when unemployment starts to rise those traditional back stops will no longer be there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Though that might hold for most things based on the fact that there'll simply be more people as time goes by for quite a while yet, it won't hold generally.
For a start, depending on how broadly you define your industries, you can always cheat.
The people who made cars are... well... gone.
The people who ran music shops... gone.
The people who took orders at McDonald's... gone.
The people behind my bank counter... gone.
Now that doesn't mean that they can't have hired more bank tellers internally to the bank in other roles, it means that there aren't many bank tellers left. All those people who sat behind a bank branch handling cheques? Gone.
Replaced by a handful of computer technicians and people making machines to accept cheques, and people servicing that infrastructure, sure. But the role has gone. And I very, very much doubt that banks are hiring more people to fulfill that role even if they are hiring more people overall.
If you account for "natural inflation", in that there are just that many more customers, branches and people around, then some industries are indeed dying off. Say, staff-per-customer. That's plummeting in some industries. And there's a reason for that.
Whether the *number* of jobs grows isn't the bet here. It's the proportion (i.e. less humans, more machines, proportionally).
Even IT... I can manage a thousand machines from one desktop. I couldn't do that 20 years before. It simply wasn't possible. But I might have the same team-size as I did back then. The problem is, the other guy is nothing but a keyboard jockey, and proportionally I'm servicing twice as many users as I was back then too.
Thus, though the number may not have changed, the proportion and skills has drastically shifted to the machines instead of the people.
Travel agencies died with the advent of online travel price comparison sites (flights, hotels, etc.). Their replacements may have generated more IT jobs, maybe even more sales jobs, but it didn't make more jobs in the actual travel industry, just the opposite.
Whatever way you look at it, that's a hit. And it's predicated on one problem... that as things get more automated, more of those industry jobs go to IT (whether coding, server support, datacentre rookie, or just plain tech support). And more and more of IT is getting automated. You don't even speak to advisers on websites any more, little AI chatbots cut the simple questions out.
Before long there will be a significant hit to other areas. Big supermarkets and shops probably spend more on their online services now than they do on ground staff... it's ground rent that's killing them and pushing them out of the high-street. Do you know how many big-name high-street retailers have gone out of business in the UK in the last 10 years alone? To be replaced with websites.
And last time I changed car insurer, it was all done online (there's an industry that's almost dead offline), and LITERALLY the backend/company/underwriters that actually insured me for my old and new policies from two different brand names were the same place. Same web interface. Same underwriting clauses. Same technical data access. But two different "brands" offering the same insurance policy at completely different prices.
If anything, that's a perfect example that shows you what will happen - an enormous shift to IT-running of these places, everything operated on the basis of algorithms, no human-face at all (even the customer support lines are way understaffed and refer you to the website more than anything) and then an enormous consolidation of those services from all kinds of places into one place that they all outsource to.
It's slow. There are ALWAYS jobs if you want to go looking for them. But it's inevitable, measurable and inexorable.
I'd go for Insurance as the industry. And I'd say that once things like PPI claims etc. are past their expiry dates, those numbers will plummet. Because, as an industry, they just don't nee
is that it's an excuse to make the developers pull double duty as sys admins. It also lets companies take jobs that used to require little more than a high school diploma, declare them as "Developer" jobs in need of an advanced degree and bring in H1-Bs to take them. Basically, it's longer hours and lower pay for everyone.
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The question, of course, is what the humans will do when there half as many jobs.
Traditionally, they become homeless, then they starve in an alleyway. Hopefully there will be a machine to dispose of the body.
Technology creates jobs, until the technology starts becoming more capable by itself, in more and more areas, than people, then technology creates more jobs for other technology, not for people. That's what people can't seem to get into their obtuse skulls.
There seems to be one of those "denial" psychological problems going on. It's too terrible to contemplate, therefore we'll deny it.
Global warming due to human GHG emissions. DENIED. Check.
Job reduction trend due to better-than-human automation. DENIED. Check.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?